Technical Topics

Introduction to jQuery UI

After many months of stellar work, the jQuery UI team has released version 1.5 of their flagship suite of user-interface widgets, components, and effects. This release was focused on bringing you a standardized development API across all of the components, allowing for a more seamless experience when working with the jQuery UI library.

A very exciting CSS theming application was also released with jQuery UI 1.5, calledThemeRoller. ThemeRoller is an amazing way to customize the style and colors across all of the jQuery UI components. It comes with a few preset styles, as well as allowing you to create your own. Once you are done, it packages your theme into a zip file that contains all of the images and CSS you need.

Brief Overview of the jQuery UI Project

The jQuery UI project was originally created to bring you a set of “official” jQuery plugins. Mature components from the plugins repository were pulled together to form the first release of jQuery UI. But since each of these plugins had its own style, having been written by different authors, the first release of the library felt a bit cumbersome when packaged together. With that in mind, the focus of UI 1.5 was on achieving a coherent, standardized API to eliminate much of the differences between the components. Through much time and effort, many bugs and feature requests were addressed along the way as well.

Inside Look at jQuery UI Version 1.5

Before starting, I want to make sure you know where the jQuery UI Documentation is located. You may also want to head to the download page to grab the library for yourself. Note that the development bundle is the easiest to get started with.

First, let’s start by including the necessary files for jQuery UI: jQuery latest js file, the Flora theme complete stylesheet, and the core UI file. Each of the components is built on top of these files. Here is how to include them:

The component defaults can be overridden by passing in options to the main function. For instance, if we want to make the div drag only horizontally, we can set the axis option to “x” with the following code: